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Quoted in the News? Post a Comment, Please

THE days when the journalist had the last say about a subject are long gone. This thought is usually expressed by repeating — and then dismissing as outdated — the words of A. J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

“Owning a press” today is as simple as publishing a blog, right? (That would make more than 100 million press owners, by some counts.) But not all presses are made equal. The leaders in online news are the familiar names — CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post — so a source’s response to a journalist’s work won’t necessarily carry the same volume as the original article, even online.

Google News, an increasingly popular way to get news online, may tip that balance, however, with a feature it calls “Comments From People in the News.” The idea is simple: if you have been quoted in an article that appears on Google News, which presents links and summaries from 4,500 news sources, including the familiar big players, you can post a comment that will be paired with that article. (Journalists can comment, as well, Google says, though none have done so thus far.)

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Since it was introduced in the spring, the feature has largely existed under the radar. Roughly 150 total comments are available, and they stay up for a month, with five or six being added each day to replace those dropping off. Promoting it has been a bit of trick, says Josh Cohen, the business project manager of Google News, because people quoted in articles are “such a small subset, putting a button to ‘comment on this story’ doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Part of the challenge is how do you get the word out there,” he said. Thus far, Google News has used e-mail messages to encourage people quoted in articles to submit comments — an effort to prime the pump similar to the process that results in the first issue of a new magazine magically having letters to the editor.

“They sent me an e-mail and gave me a link,” said Joel Downs, president of the Fort Worth chapter of Citizens for Immigration Reform, an advocacy group that is “trying to make statutory changes in Texas to make life difficult for illegal migrants.” He said he was pleased with the way he was quoted in an article in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram after a five-minute interview with the reporter, Patrick McGee.

“He did what I expected,” said Mr. Downs said, adding that he then thought, “I’ve got this opportunity. I may as well have expanded on it.”

Photo

Credit
Lonni Sue Johnson

So he wrote out his analogy comparing illegal immigrants with people who join a “20 items or less” line at the grocery store with an overloaded cart — an analogy that Mr. McGee decided not to include in his article. “Only this is not a grocery store, this is far more important,” Mr. Downs wrote in his comment. “This is the cashier stand of life, and the anger is boiling hot. These folks, the unlawful migrants, have gamed the system simply by ignoring it.”

The people behind Google News stress that they are not in the business of journalism. The comments are not edited, and Mr. Cohen says that when staff members solicit comments from a source in an article, all sources are contacted. “We are relying on the people who were identified by the journalists,” he notes.

“It’s pretty consistent with Google News,” he said. “We want as many different perspectives on a story as possible, across the political spectrum, geographically.”

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Mr. Cohen said that it was too early to evaluate whether the comments feature had been a success — right now, it is an experiment that only affects the English version of Google News. Among the issues to consider, he said, is whether enough comments continue to come in, whether they are more than “he said she said” kind of banter and whether people read them.

Still to be determined, Mr. Cohen said, is whether articles with comments have higher click-through rates, which brings us to the corporation’s bottom line. The comments feature is yet another example of Google’s getting into the content-generating business, as opposed to the content-searching business. With efforts like book scanning, or its Blogger service or the recently unveiled “knol” project under which specialists write encyclopedia-type articles, Google is actively adding information to the world, not merely organizing it.

What will it mean for journalists? Well, they will still have a role. The lesson that the comments show is the numbing amount of material that journalists (the original information filter) must wade through to create a coherent article.

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Mr. McGee, who covers immigration in Texas, said he was used to his articles being scrutinized. “You talk with someone for an hour or more, and they say, ‘Why didn’t you include this and this?’” he said. “And I say, ‘Look at the article. I spoke with many people for just as long.’”